NightSky is a fast and flexible rules framework for tabletop role-playing games.
Overview
The aim of NightSky is to make it quick and easy to adjudicate actions and consequences in games, removing as many barriers to play as possible.
You don’t need to schedule out a block of time to play, you don’t need to find a table to sit around, and you don’t need to print out a character sheet or borrow a rulebook. The game can be played under a tree, or on the beach. All you need is a notebook, a dice, a few minutes, and a friend.
Structure
One person is the referee. They present a world to the players, bringing it to life with descriptions and narration. Everyone else is a player, each controlling a character in the game. Their choices and actions shape the story, with their characters exploring and exploiting the world that the referee has created.
The game is a back-and-forth conversation between referee and players. The referee presents a situation, the players make choices and perform actions, and the referee and the dice determine the consequences.
Things you need
All you need to play are a pen, a piece of paper, and a single twenty-sided die.
If you have them on hand, three six-sided dice are handy for making a character at the very start. If you can only find one die, you can roll it three times. If you don’t have any, you can make do with a twenty-sided die instead, dividing each roll by three and rounding down, re-rolling if you round to zero.
Making a character
Before you can start, you’ll need a character to play as. To make one, roll three six-sided dice and write down the total. Do this five times over, and you’ll end up with five numbers between 3 and 18. These are your starting values for the five attributes, as follows:
- The first number is your strength, representing power, speed, force
- The second number is your dexterity, representing coordination, precision, agility
- The third number is your vitality, representing health, endurance, vigour
- The fourth number is your intuition, representing focus, perception, awareness
- The fifth number is your presence, representing confidence, willpower, morale
You can put the six-sided dice aside now. From this point onwards, you’ll only need a twenty-sided die to play.
How to play
NightSky is about choosing actions, testing for success, and then dealing with the consequences. This is all handled by a single mechanic, with a twenty-sided die being used to determine success.
When a player wants to perform a risky action, the referee will determine the attribute that best applies to the action.
Next, the referee will choose a number that represents how difficult the task is, with 5 being easy, 10 being average, 15 being hard, and 20 being daunting. Any complicating factors will increase the difficulty by 1, 2, or 5.
Then, the player will describe how they perform the task. Any aiding factors will increase their roll by 1, 2, or 5.
Finally, the player rolls the twenty-sided die, adding the attribute modifier (the attribute value minus 10) and any bonuses. They succeed if they meet or exceed the difficulty value that was chosen by the referee.
To add nuance, succeeding or failing by five or more can result in further consequences.
Another example
Here’s one more example showing the action flow. It’s a lot faster now that the rules have been explained.
The referee decides that this is a strength action with a difficulty of 10. You roll the die and get 8, to which you add your strength modifier of +3 to get 11. This meets or exceeds the difficulty, so you succeed.
This structure is the game, forming a tight loop of description, choice, action, and consequence. With each action, the characters and the world are changed in small ways, altering the shape of the story being told.
Cascading failures
When a character is hurt, the damage is applied directly to their attributes instead of a separate pool of hit points. This creates a feedback loop between actions and consequences, driving players to deal with the consequences before they can cascade out of control.
Our intrepid character from the above examples twisted their ankle when attempting to climb a wall, getting a -2 penalty to dexterity. In a rules system where the twisted ankle is tracked as a separate damage value, they would be free to make a second attempt with a similar chance of success. In NightSky, however, the dexterity penalty is applied to their next attempt, reducing their chance of success and increasing the risk of further injury.
Taking this further, we could decide that a twisted ankle is healed with a vitality test. At each hour in-game, you roll the die and add your vitality modifier, testing against a difficulty of 10. When you succeed, your ankle is healed and the penalty is removed. But if you’re freezing cold and soaking wet, you might have received a -2 penalty to your vitality, which will affect how fast your ankle can heal. This makes sense intuitively, because your body would have to divert energy from healing to keep you warm.
Adding rules
New rules work best when they integrate tightly with the attribute system. This section will explore a couple of potential rules for a survival game built on top of NightSky.
We can start by adding a rule for character death: a character dies when their vitality drops to zero. This could be a result of any set of conditions such as hypothermia, starvation, blood loss, or exhaustion, so long as each of those conditions applies a penalty to vitality.
Next, we could add a rule for hypothermia: for each hour of exposure, succeed on a vitality test versus 10 or become weakened, applying a cumulative -1 penalty to every attribute. We could tweak the rule as needed, such as by testing every quarter-hour instead if the character is rain-soaked, but it works well regardless.
The hypothermia rule is a good case study because the penalty isn’t guaranteed; the chance that you get affected by the cold is based on your vitality score. This means that a strong (or lucky) character could hike for hours through a blizzard, while an already-weakened one would succumb quickly to the cold.
This feels intuitive, some people are just better at coping with cold than others. It also feels fair, the chance of success is affected by the consequences of prior actions. Lastly, it provides tension, there’s a chance that things could go better or worse than expected.
A larger scale
As in other role-playing games, the referee has the most difficult job: to come up with an interesting world for the players to explore. This section is a collection of guidelines to help the referee set up for an engaging game with minimal toil.
No stories
Your job as the referee isn’t to plan out a story, it’s to paint a world. Instead of planning out how a particular story will unfold, you should invent a place that could support any number of intriguing stories, but without caring for how those stories will turn out. Devise an interesting collection of people and places, linked loosely by fate and fortune. It’s only once the players come careening on through that a story is created.
No names
A place needs people, and naming people is hard. Instead of coming up with a unique name for every individual, choose an interesting adjective-noun combination. People with names like the ‘Scrawny Botanist’ or ‘Dishevelled Banker’ are more evocative than Patricia, Clarence, or Brent. They act as mnemonic devices, helping you to pick each character from a crowd, and they hint at motivations and personalities.
No maps
People need a place, and mapping places is hard. When two elements are drawn out, the space between will call to be filled in. Instead of drafting a map, you should write down a short description for each place, with enough colour in the words to work with later. ‘A long brick factory, boisterous with the clatter of steel’ is a good deal easier to come up with, and it’s only a short jump to picturing wide arched entrance-ways, smoke belching from thick chimneys, and weary-eyed workers trudging out at sunset. Leave room in the gaps for possibilities.
No prep
Planning for every eventuality is thankless work. Once you have your people and places, you’ll have everything that you need to run the game. Remember, you’re exploring the world too, just like the players. If you find yourself without anything to work with, don’t sweat it! Step away for a minute, flesh out a character, write up a new description, and join back in. If you’re really in a pinch, just throw in a pack of feral dogs or a botched robbery, and let the chaos carry itself. Don’t strive for perfection, you’re just telling a cool story with a group of friends.